To be fair, I don't do that anymore. I simply get a pre-built pc, usually with minimal input as to specs.
I like to equate this with my father's upbringing - he built (rebuilt) a car from scratch - he had tools like valve grinders and so on. Clearly one can't do that today.
I don't know what the new thing is. Technically I could have built a car (it was still low tech enough) but I didn't have the interest. My dad introduced me to computers, and kept me supplied with broken bits from work, but ultimately it was my interest.
I think, as a father, my goal was to not really dictate their interest, but to nurture it a bit where it came up. There was no real hardware equivalent in my kids lives, so I have no advice from that point of view.
They may have interests on other areas, like music or sport - if I have any advice it's that they need to find it, you can't really "force" it.
But more than once she comes to me in panic because she "lost" an important file for a project, and I then drop down to explorer or better yet the command line to locate the "lost" file.
At least I can still be a hero in her eyes :)
You can make almost anything in your basement or garage. You can even make small quantity custom ICs[1] if you really try hard.
For geeks, I guess the "new PC" was embeddable stuff (Arduino, micro controllers, Raspberry Pi) but that seems like it's more the heady days of Radio Shack in the late 1970s than PCs.
Looking back it seemed, at first, that the PCs were a logical extension of that Radio Shack type tinkering. So if history is going to rhyme, the "next PC" is going to be tangential to the hobbyist tinkering but spring up from it.
Wild guesses would have to be something that is right now unaffordable for the average person but can be built out of that stuff (i.e. nobody could afford their own PC until the 8080/Z80/6502 based machines). And it will have to be something of the "I didn't know I needed that" kind of application.
So...maybe home medical labs. Like Theranos wanted to be, but actually works. Like you could use one to tailor your diet, or monitor your health issues without having to go through the rigmarole of a lab. The first ones will get built out of a pile of gubbins, then somebody coalesces a kit, then it goes ballistic.
No matter how you turn it. Apple? SOC/SBC. VR? The hardware is agin that. Phones. Laptops. Watches. Game consoles.
I would expect most electronics to move from microcontroller level to some sort of computer. The question is more where it sticks and provides value.
The toolchain is getting better by the day, even for hobby stuff. I am now used to send kicad stuff off for manufacturing. 2 weeks and I get a PCB back. Platformio removed the tool chain madnesses.
My son now wants to build a game console now. I might do that with him, for the joy of it.
I think the future will need peopke who can make physical digital things again. At a way bigger scale.
That and the new ML waves, but I don't think this will work well for kids.
- It's expensive / difficult to operate / only used by those in the know
- It doesn't do half as much as you can hope it will do.
- Eventually it will be ubiquitous.
Im assuming you mean the many GPU hours that go into training the HUGE ML models like DALL-E, etc. That is FAR from the norm.
After following online courses I was able to solve real problems in my domain of interest with nothing more than a few hours training with a relatively small (<500MB) dataset on my PCs GPU. It cost WAY less than a dollar to train, and is now used by thousands of unskilled users on their mobile devices daily.
Google Collab and PaperSpace have free tiers and for only $10/month you can get access to GPU's on PaperSpace with the capacity to train fairly decently sized models.
There is a wealth of intro material (this one is pretty good https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/hands-on-machine-learni...) to get you started.
Even with the largest models that are not feasible for individuals to train (Large Language Models for example, that are so expensive even most companies can't afford to build them) there are refinement techniques that let you take existing models and train them for specific tasks. That kind of training can run on most higher end consumer grade GPU's.
I'll admit I am bit biased since I have worked in the field of AI for 20 years now, but I really don't see anything limiting even a mildly committed individual from getting into this area, even if only as a hobby.
My point exactly: it shares a lot of similarity to PCs in the early 90s
I also make it a point to have him with me and help doing handy work around the house, and some of my weekend wood working(very limited as he can’t yet be around the power saws or much of fine saw dust).
I hope to give him as many chances as possible to get his spark. What that would be is a mystery.
* Mass produced housing built by machines.
* Biological innovations (cures, manipulations, treating biology as circuitry to design stuff).
* Robotics. As AI becomes more powerful robotics gets more useful. Robotics will allow automation of many tasks. Agriculture will be transformed.
* Medical sensing. Get an actual diagnosis rather than a guess. Being able to test for specific bacteria and viruses will be huge.
* Actual big advances in physics. Now that everyone has gotten over Einstein the kids are questioning all the dogma and finding new things.
* Computers that are more usable. Current computers are really picky, you can't leave out that semicolon. Computers that do what people want rather than following precise logical steps could transform the use of computers. Standards could help turn the insane model of having an app for everything to turning phones and tablets into general purpose control surfaces. No need to run an app, just move the slider. It should all just work, no configuration/password/network connection setup/app required.
AI software is probably a good candidate. It's currently hit and miss, but could become omnipresent in a decade. The hype is both real and not so real. Currently, it's in the domain of tinkerers.
In a more practical sense, I see the gap widening between those who use technology as escapism and those who use it as a tool to further their own goals. The ability to critically think in between distractions could be the killer feature. Or to be more precise, the capacity to understand the present rather than predict the future.
The HP-85 had a little CRT screen and built-in printer.
During the evenings my dad did some actuarial programming on it and during the day it was all mine to play around with - made my career in programming.
Mobile phones are the new PC today but sadly they don't expose themselves like the machines of the past to programming and the likes - maybe it is good thing that they are appliances.
Those that wish to discover things like we did will find their way to Rasberry Pi etc ....
A desktop PC is still good for AAA gaming or immersive VR experiences as are game consoles as well as media consumption tablets and phones.
It's clear the techlash has taken a bat to trust, people still think all this stuff is Satan's work.
Also it'll muss your hair a bit.
It could be something around AI, seeing the progress we are making with human-AI interfaces (GPT-NeoX, Stable Diffusion) I could envision those changing the way we live and work.
I'd vote for CRISPR home kits. https://www.the-odin.com/diy-crispr-kit/
A scary idea, but my best guess none the less.
Lots of stuff to explore in nature. Getting out there could be a way for all family members to get off their screens a bit.
I don't have a crystal ball so I can't tell you what will survive but I'd focus on tools rather than on distraction devices. Teach him how to navigate the web, how to perform searches, etc.
Sure they're commercial and easy to purchase - but not nearly as common as xbox/playstations or smartphones/computers.
The "problem" with VR isn't so much that it's VR as much as it's less like hardware and more like a social media website. You can buy a PC and not keep it hooked up to the network very often and it's still kinda useful. In fact, I often disconnect from the net to do coding tasks without distraction. Not so for a VR headset; it's a peripheral for hooking you up to a very active network connection. You could have a local VR environment, but it's most likely a game.
And the whole thing about media sites is they value ownership of your identity over functionality. During the final days of the "classic Linden" era, we were working on an Open Metaverse where we would provide services to other metaverse operators, but no one wanted to share ID info.
But to answer your question... what's next in terms of hardware? Think of the modern era, but easier to manufacture. What you may not remember about your dad's laptop is it had a real keyboard. Now we have crap chicklet keypads on everything. Want a laptop with a real keyboard? Tough Rockos, chump.
I worked with Jeff Hawkins when I was a Tandy contractor and later at Handspring. He made an observation that may be obvious to the product manager types, but blew my little engineering mind away: "People don't buy platforms, they buy products." To me that means it's really hard to sell an IoT Gateway into someone's home. (Not impossible, just really, really hard.) The closest thing to a platform you can sell to a home user is a wi-fi/router combo. And even then they're probably renting it from their provider. (That's a long paragraph to say IoT gateway devices aren't the next PC.) Or maybe streaming boxes. But again, people aren't buying those to be part of a hardware ecosystem (as much as Apple wishes you would.) They're buying those so they can get content from a streaming provider they already have an account with.
Wrapping this all up... Everything is connected these days (or at least potentially connected.) I had to be careful to not accidentally buy a coffee maker that didn't phone home to post my coffee drinking habits to someone's social media platform. I think "the PC" is pretty close to it's terminal form. As a device that stays in one place and lets you run a browser and maybe excel on a reasonably sized screen. Laptops are similar, but they have crap keyboards and smaller screens and the TSA agent at your local airport won't bat an eye when you bring them on a plane. A VR headset would be a different kind of device for a different purpose. It's like comparing mobile phones to automated sprinkler controllers. They're used for radically different things and it would be an uphill climb to convince people to use a mobile browser on the sprinkler or permanently attach their mobile phone to a relay/valve control system.
What comes next to replace the modern PC? Slightly smaller, slightly faster, but crappier (more difficult to use) PCs.